Tabletop roleplaying thoughts by a London geek

Powered by the Apocalypse

I was thinking recently: someone could totally run an Apocalypse World game in which all the player characters were based on the Avengers.

I don’t mean a hack to tell Avengers-style superhero stories. There are already plenty of Powered by the Apocalypse superhero games that do that (Masks and Worlds in Peril, for example). Instead, this would use Apocalypse World‘s rules as written to tell a sort of What If…? story.

What if the Avengers were formed 50 years after the end of the world?

What do the Avengers (Captain America, Hulk, Iron Man, etc.) look like in the blasted, lethal, psychic-powered Apocalypse World?

Does it work? Is it a good idea to even try? I don’t know, but I’d better get the idea out there quick before Avengers: Infinity War comes out and transforms the general population’s understanding of who the Avengers are! Especially now that the superheroically talented Melissa Trender has provided some fantastic illustrations! Read on for that if nothing else!

RPGaDay is an annual celebration of tabletop roleplaying. This is the first year I’ve tried to do it.

Which RPG do you prefer for open-ended campaign play?

As I mentioned on Day 9, while I’m happy to play indefinite-length campaigns now and then, when I run campaigns for other people I’ll usually want them to be of a fixed length. That usually means that I’ll have some idea of what direction the campaign is going since character creation, before the first session of the game proper.

As such, if I was going to run an open-ended campaign I’d want a system in which character creation is baked into the first session, and in which the priority is playing to find out what happens. That’s Apocalypse World. Not other games Powered by the Apocalypse, just the original. Make a setting you love to play in, take characters who bring the drama with them wherever they go, and set them loose. If characters die or fronts get resolved, just make new ones and keep going. No other game I’ve played does it better.